Rehabilitation in the context of Soviet or Russian topics is often a "false friend" used to translate the Russian term "reabilitatsiya" as applied to convicted persons. The appropriate terms would be "exoneration" or "exculpation".

Rehabilitation of the victims of Soviet repressions

---

Mass rehabilitation of the Victims of Soviet repressions started after the death of Joseph Stalin. Initially, in 1953, it was in the form of amnesty for those who had been sentenced for the term at most 5 years. The regular release of political prisoners from Gulag labor camps started in 1954. This release became coupled with exonerations after the Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in his 1956 speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences.

In many cases the persons were released with an insulting version of the corpus delicti: "due to the lack of a proof of guilt", rather than "due to the lack of a criminal matter". Many rehabilitations occurred posthumously.

Russian law | Political repression in the Soviet Union | Soviet law | Soviet phraseology